1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the production of entertainment content. More particularly, the present invention relates to the production of computer mediated interactive entertainment content.
2. Background Art
Websites such as MySpace and YouTube have demonstrated the rapid ascendancy of computers and the Internet as preferred providers of topical information, entertainment content, and social interaction. These popular Internet resources show that as the demographic of computer users has broadened and diversified to include a youthful, technologically sophisticated population, greater importance is placed on computer mediated virtual communities as sources of social networking opportunities. The increasingly demanding group of young computer users who frequent these virtual forums insist upon access to frequently updated content, and have progressively higher expectations of the richness of the computer mediated entertainment found there.
Content providers, seeking to design computer applications to meet these ever loftier consumer expectations, quickly found the conventional Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) data format too constraining. As a result, more and more web content has been developed using data formats better enabling of the dynamic, rich media experience preferred by content consumers, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), for example. Use of these versatile data formats, together with embedded graphics applications such as Flash, for instance, have aided content providers in delivering enhanced graphical entertainment content to consumers.
Despite these improvements in displaying entertainment content, many computer entertainment platforms utilizing graphics applications such as Flash have been designed to deliver content, however sophisticated, as one-way presentations to a largely passive audience. The increasingly engaged and interactive character of the present day audience, however, makes this unilateral presentation format somewhat obsolete. One conventional way in which content providers have attempted to compensate for the interactive deficiency of their products within the established presentation format, is by diversifying the variety of content available to users of a single website or software application. Although perhaps effective in catering to a broader spectrum of entertainment tastes, this approach fails to remedy the deficiencies in a content delivery framework premised on passive consumption of a pre-formulated entertainment product.
Alternatively, a conventional approach to accommodating user preferences for interactive computer entertainment invites a computer user to become actively involved in a predetermined entertainment experience, perhaps by playing a computer game, or by entering a virtual music studio to create a personal audio mix, for example. The conventional interactive entertainment products offered under this approach, however, tend to be highly focused on a specific type of entertainment content, i.e. games and music in particular examples cited. Consequently, this conventional approach, while providing an interactive entertainment experience, may do so at the cost of content variety, and responsiveness to rapidly changing consumer tastes.
Attempts to merge these two alternative conventional approaches have encountered thus far largely unmet challenges arising from the complexity of delivering content that is concurrently interactive, diverse, and quickly responsive to shifting consumer preferences. Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by providing a solution enabling a content delivery framework providing rich multimedia interactions that are varied, topical, and flexible in the face of changes in consumer interest.